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I love this guy: 'Why would you spend a lot of money trying to build a service in Canada when Canadians take so much without paying for it?'. I don't know Mr. Henderson, but Pandora is apparently willing to do so, so maybe you should ease off the royalties a bit and that way you will get some money for "your" music. Instead, without services like Pandora people have limited venues for listening to music and as you said they will just take the path of least resistance and get their music for free. Didn't you learn anything from the past decade's battle over digital music distribution.You aren't in a position to negotiate. People already have access to free music. The only thing you can do is provide them with a legal and more convenient alternative.

dkd903 writes "A rumor has been going around for about four months that Valve was working on a Linux version of Steam and this had a lot of people in the Linux community very excited. But, Valve has now officially killed the rumor. And it is not what people wants to hear – there is no Linux version of Steam in development. Doug Lombardi, the Marketing VP of Valve Corporation, in an interview, has put an end to all the rumors by saying that they are not working on Steam for Linux right now."

ainandil writes "Engineering mistakes, while frustrating, seldom definitively alter the end user's life. Not so in Cripple Creek, Colorado — MaryAnn and Jim McMahon thought their money troubles were over when they hit an $11 million jackpot at a casino Tuesday. Before paying the jackpot, the Wildwood Casino turned the machine over to the Colorado Gaming Division for inspection. A glitch was found, aha! The Wildwood Casino blamed a slot machine malfunction for the $11 million jackpot. Total actually won by the McMahons? $1,627.82."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Despite having had some time to get their act together, Obama's Department of Justice has filed yet another brief defending the RIAA's outlandish statutory damages theory — that someone who downloaded an mp3 with a 99-cent retail value, causing a maximum possible damages of 35 cents, is liable for from $750 to $150,000 for each such file downloaded, in SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum. The 25- page brief (PDF) continues the DOJ's practice of (a) ignoring the case law which holds that the Supreme Court's due process jurisprudence is applicable to statutory damages, (b) ignoring the law review articles to like effect, (c) ignoring the actual holding of the 1919 case they rely upon, (d) ignoring the fact that the RIAA failed to prove 'distribution' as defined by the Copyright Act, and (e) ignoring the actual wording and reasoning of the Supreme Court in its leading Gore and Campbell decisions. Jon Newton of p2pnet.net attributes the Justice Department's 'oversights' to the 'eye-popping number of people [in its employ] who worked for, and/or are directly connected with, Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music's RIAA.'"

I disagree with your notion that people will want to pay for other peoples opinions. This may have once been the case, but now the internet is awash with blogs and such that are almost exclusively other people's opinions. The way I see it it will only become more and more difficult for the NYT or any one else to convince readers that their columnists are so much "better" than the average blogger. The strength of the newspapers is that they can publish research intensive articles because their reporters are dedicated to this sort of thing. These sort of articles are what I enjoy reading in a paper. Problem is I think it is hard to convince people to read this sort of article rather than simply reading the summary from news aggregate (unless the reader has a very deep rooted interest in the subject).

itwbennett writes "The IE attack code used in last month's attack on Google and 33 other companies was submitted for analysis Thursday on the Wepawet malware analysis Web site. One day after being made publicly available, it had been included in at least one hacking tool and could be seen in online attacks, according to Dave Marcus, director of security research and communications at McAfee. Marcus noted that the attack is very reliable on IE 6 running on Windows XP, and could possibly be modified to work on newer versions of IE."

MikeChino writes "A company called Absorbent Materials has created a new kind of 'swelling glass' that can clean up contaminated groundwater by soaking up volatile molecules like a sponge. Dubbed 'Obsorb,' the material can hold up to 8 times its weight in fuel, oil, and solvents without sucking up any of the water itself. Once the material is full it floats to the surface and the pollutants can be skimmed off."

JohnnyBGod writes "Lotus claim to have invented a new, more efficient engine design. The two-stroke, flex-fuel engine can achieve, according to the surprisingly technical press release, 'approximately 10% better [fuel consumption] than current spray-guided direct injection, spark ignition engines.' The engine has a sliding puck arrangement to control its compression ratio, and has direct injection and a wet sump, to eliminate fuel leakage to the exhaust and the need to mix oil with the fuel, two common problems with two-stroke engines. Lotus engineering have released a video explaining the engine's operation."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "According to Ambassador Ron Kirk, the head of US Trade Representatives, the secrecy around the ACTA copyright treaty is necessary because without that secrecy, people would be 'walking away from the table.' If you don't remember, that treaty is the one where leaks indicate that it may contain all sorts of provisions for online copyright enforcement, like a global DMCA with takedown and anti-circumvention restrictions, three-strikes laws to terminate offending internet connections, and copyright cops. FOIA requests for the treaty text have been rebuffed over alleged 'national security' concerns. One can only hope that what he has said is true and that sites like Wikileaks will help tear down the veil of secrecy behind which they're negotiating our future."

boggis writes "Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times journalist, is calling for a boycott of Microsoft's Bing. They have censored search requests at the request of the Chinese Government (like certainothers). The difference is that Bing has censored all searches done anywhere in simplified Chinese characters (the characters used in mainland China). This means that a Chinese speaker searching for Tiananmen anywhere in the world now gets the impression that it is just a lovely place to visit."

Falc0n writes "WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software. Dries Buytaert reflected on this, adding: 'this is a clear sign that governments realize that Open Source does not pose additional risks compared to proprietary software, and furthermore, that by moving away from proprietary software, they are not being locked into a particular technology, and that they can benefit from the innovation that is the result of thousands of developers collaborating on Drupal.'"

Mantrid42 writes "Researchers have been able to affect the brains of lab mice using light. Working in a new field called Optogenetics (optical stimulation plus genetic engineering), scientists injected lab mice with genes that can stimulate or inhibit neural activity based on the color of the light they're exposed to, and can be targeted to infect only on certain cell types. Additionally, another gene has been added to make neurons glow green when firing, allowing two-way communication between a brain and a machine."

nk497 writes "Steve Ballmer has admitted Microsoft's licensing is too complicated and contains too much fine print, but has no plans to change it at the risk of angering shareholders — and even customers who benefit from the confusion. "I'm sure we have fine print we don't need. We're not saints," he said, adding that customers have a way of figuring out how to pay the least amount of cash possible to use Microsoft's software. "Customers always find an approach which pays us less money.""

I have a sneaking suspicion that the mpaa or riaa are going to get an amendment into this bill that will "stop piracy". I mean, a bill that pertains to p2p and doesn't include such an amendment, what's the chances of that?